Over the course of 2014, The Net Advance of Physics plans to serialise
Alexander Moszkowski's Einstein the Searcher, a largely-forgotten
text which, in addition to being one of the first popular accounts of relativity,
provides a glimpse of Einstein's personal philosophy at the moment
when he emerged on the international stage as a public figure.

Moszkowski, born in
1851, was a successful journalist and popular novelist --
one of the first writers of science fiction
in German -- but for that very reason
had a somewhat controversial reputation. He met Einstein
in 1916 and immediately knew that here was someone history would
remember as a German titan like Goethe ; he resolved forthwith
to be remembered himself as a new Eckermann, and carefully recorded all
of his conversations with the rising genius. The decision to publish these
"dialogues" was obviously catalysed by the enormous publicity
accompanying the 1919 British eclipse expedition, and was strenuously
opposed by Max and Heidi Born, who despised Moszkowski as
a low-brow money-grubber. (The story of how Einstein the Searcher
came into the world despite the Borns' venom and Einstein's own ambivalence
has been told entertainingly by Kevin Brown
in his essay
The Moszkowski Affair at MathPages.Com.) The published text of 1921
(followed here) apparently is only part of what Moszkowski wrote,
having been heavily abridged in the fear that a longer work would make
Einstein come across as a narcissist obsessed with his own fame.
(Eckermann, after all, had published his memoirs only after
Goethe's death -- Moszkowski, twenty-eight years older than
Einstein, was naturally unwilling to wait!)
Even in its partial state Einstein the Searcher fulfills
its German title, providing remarkable and otherwise unobtainable
"insights into the thought-world" of the greatest physicist of the 1900s
during a critical period of his life. While
the reader might wish that there was
a bit more Einstein and less Moszkowski in some of the dialogues,
one cannot
but be grateful to the author for recording (and sometimes provoking)
Einstein's comments on subjects about which his views would otherwise
be unknown.

New chapters will be added
at five-week intervals. Although Brose's translation
will provide the basis of this edition, it will be checked against the
German original and a few notes will be added. It is hoped that
Einstein specialists and other scholars who happen to find this
site will provide additional input that can be incorporated into
this edition ; please write to Norman Hugh Redington,
redingtn at mit full-stop edu.